GRALE

GRALE is a set of tools - a library and a number of accompanying applications - to study gravitational lenses. Gravitational lenses are astronomical objects so massive that their gravitational pull even deflects light rays. This can cause multiple copies of the same background object to be visible, like a cosmic mirage. The locations and shapes of these copies can provide information about the mass distribution of the gravitational lens, which GRALE can help recover using a genetic algorithm-based method. Apart from these so-called lens inversions, it's also possible to simulate gravitational lenses.